Man on Wire

There was noth­ing spe­cial about the morn­ing of August 7, 1974, in Low­er Man­hat­tan, just as there was noth­ing spe­cial about the morn­ing of 11 Sep­tem­ber, 2001. But if you looked up on those two morn­ings, up into the clear blue sky where the shin­ing glass and steel of the World Trade Cen­ter tow­ers reached 1400 feet above you, then the ordi­nar­i­ness of those morn­ings was shattered.

Because there was a man perched on a cable strung between the build­ings danc­ing across the clouds like he’d tak­en flight. And there was a plane fly­ing too low and too close before it dis­ap­peared, turn­ing that shin­ing glass and steel to ruin.

James Marsh’s Man on Wire may only be the sto­ry of one of those days, but it unques­tion­ably recalls them both. To cel­e­brate Philippe Petit’s leg­endary wire walk of 1974 is to release our mem­o­ry of the World Trade Cen­ter from the grip of 2001. James Marsh and Philippe Petit have reclaimed cre­ation from destruc­tion, and though Man on Wire may not breath a word about the events of ⁹⁄₁₁, it is nonethe­less an act of glo­ri­ous defiance.

It is also a grip­ping sto­ry. In 1968, Philippe Petit was an 18-year-old street artist liv­ing in Paris when he saw an advert for two tow­ers that would soon be built in New York. Inspired, he began schem­ing with his friends to stage a unique wire walk­ing per­for­mance. It was a daunt­ing chal­lenge: they would need to break into the tow­ers with their equip­ment, make their way 110 floors up, get the cable from one tow­er to the next, rig it and, final­ly, walk it.

In a stroke of inspi­ra­tion, Marsh has realised that Petit’s sto­ry isn’t your run-of-the-mill doc­u­men­tary; it’s a heist movie, and he shoots it like one. Using a mix­ture of dra­mat­ic recon­struc­tions, orig­i­nal mate­r­i­al shot by the pro­tag­o­nists, as well as talk­ing head inter­views (with Reser­voir Dogs-style nick­names), Man on Wire explodes into life.

Between Jinx Godfrey’s edit­ing and Marsh’s crime-caper sen­si­bil­i­ty, the nar­ra­tive unfolds with the sus­pense of detec­tive fic­tion, emerg­ing as a kind of glo­ri­ous­ly odd­ball hybrid between Michael Mann and Eal­ing comedy.

At the cen­tre of it all is Petit; an imp­ish eccen­tric giv­ing a com­mand per­for­mance. If it’s thanks to Marsh that the film has such dra­mat­ic sparkle, it’s thanks to Petit that it has an inef­fa­ble charm. He’s an irre­press­ible inter­vie­wee, lov­ing­ly reliv­ing his moment of triumph.

He’s a fas­ci­nat­ing char­ac­ter – an artist who brought a sense of human­i­ty to a mono­lith­ic land­scape. But if Man on Wire has a weak­ness, it’s Marsh’s inabil­i­ty to pin him down and, per­haps, to hold him to account. In his own mind, Petit is a dra­mat­ic hero, but there are hints of mono­ma­nia, self­ish­ness and manip­u­la­tion. He speaks of the World Trade Cen­ter as ​‘my tow­er’, and the ​‘betray­al’ of the peo­ple who let him down.

But it was Petit who com­mit­ted the worst act of betray­al when he returned from the World Trade Cen­ter tow­ers a glob­al icon, only to cheat on his wife and ditch his friends. Marsh, seduced by Petit’s own com­pelling sense of fic­tion, lets him off the hook with some self-jus­ti­fy­ing bluster.

And yet Petit is seduc­tive. Backed by excerpts from the work of com­pos­er Michael Nyman, his time on the wire, cap­tured in rich­ly evoca­tive pho­tographs, is an almost embar­rass­ing exam­ple of the tran­scen­dent pow­er of film. It is, in some respects, an ode to youth – to a prelap­sar­i­an age when things were sim­pler, and the impos­si­ble was in reach. Up on that wire, in those pho­tographs, Petit is frozen in time, immor­tal, a lode­stone for our cul­tur­al memory.

But here Marsh expert­ly bal­ances the majes­tic with the mun­dane. For all that he has a fine sense of the the­atre of this quixot­ic dream, he under­stands the absur­di­ty of these would-be mas­ter crim­i­nals fum­bling with their plot. The film is often as hilar­i­ous as it is gen­uine­ly inspir­ing, nowhere more so than in the con­trast between these French poets con­quer­ing the tow­ers, and the Amer­i­can author­i­ties who pack Petit off to a psy­chi­a­trist as soon as he’s down.

Maybe Marsh didn’t intend Man on Wire to be a great state­ment. He is, after all, a sto­ry­teller. But in telling this sto­ry – in the humour, the heart and the human­i­ty that he’s invest­ed in it – he’s cre­at­ed some­thing big­ger. Man on Wire allows us to find joy in the sto­ry of the World Trade Cen­ter. And if that is a sim­ple act of mem­o­ry, it is one that offers pro­found and per­haps even cathar­tic consequences.